Infantile gastroenteritis in the community:a cost-of-illness study

Abstract

Rotavirus infections are the main cause of gastroenteritis in infants and children and it is expected that by the age of 5 years, nearly every child will have experienced at least one episode of rotavirus gastroenteritis. While severe cases are hospitalized, milder disease is either treated at home or by the GP, and as such the true prevalence of rotavirus infection in the community, and the burden of disease, is unknown. This paper reports the results of a cost-of-illness study which was conducted alongside a structured community surveillance study. Forty-eight percent of our sample was found to have rotavirus acute gastroenteritis; and the average total cost of a child presenting with rotavirus gastroenteritis ranged between pound sterling 59 and pound sterling 143 per episode, depending on the perspective. Given the prevalence and severity of the disease, the estimated burden of rotavirus gastroenteritis to society is pound sterling 11.5 million per year.

The burden of pediatric diarrhea: a cross-sectional study of incurred costs and perceptions of cost among Bolivian families

“…In a cost-of-illness study from Brazil [30], indirect costs accounted for 20% of total costs for inpatients, and 72% of total costs for outpatients, which is consistent with our own estimates and those reported in 2007 for the Latin American region by Rheingans et al [15]. While these findings are consistent with two other studies, conducted in British and Canadian children [31,32], several other studies examining family-incurred costs for pediatric diarrhea in LMIC did not find indirect costs to make up a substantial proportion of overall costs [13,20,21,29]. There were several other differences in the methodology and study population between the present study and other studies on costs associated with pediatric diarrhea that may help to account for the distinct findings.…”

“…There were several other differences in the methodology and study population between the present study and other studies on costs associated with pediatric diarrhea that may help to account for the distinct findings. While the other studies in LMIC used caregiver-reported daily wages and time lost from work to develop estimates of indirect costs (as in the present analysis) [13,20-23,29,33], studies with British and Canadian children used country mean daily wage values (and caregiver-reported time lost from work) to calculate indirect costs; further, parents in the British study did not incur any direct medical costs beyond over-the-counter medications [31,32]. In the studies where indirect costs were minimal, the authors mentioned difficulty in calculating average daily wages (e.g.…”

Costs of illness due to endemic cholera

“…Previous studies of the costs of cholera [13, 14, 15] have not quantified the patient costs or the costs of cholera in endemic (rather than epidemic) settings, while previous studies of the costs of unspecified diarrhoeal disease [16,17] lacked the specificity needed to assess disease-specific interventions. This study contributes to the thin literature on community-based studies of the cost of illness due to diarrheal disease [18, 19, 20]. Hospital-based studies in Matlab and Beira found that the costs of severe cholera were USD 32 and 47, respectively, and the majority of costs are borne by the public health care system.…”

Epidemiological and clinical features of rotavirus among children younger than 5 years of age hospitalized with acute gastroenteritis in Northern Italy

“…The costs of rotavirus gastroenteritis contribute to a critical burden of disease in the pediatric population [8,9]. A recent update of the global burden of rotavirus disease put the median cost of hospital stay in EU-25 Member States at about €1,417 [9].…”